[hn_throwaway_99]

Agree 100%, which is why I wrote "In these cases it's often a lot easier to just build a Progressive Web App for Android (Google let's you put PWAs directly in the Play Store), and wrap that with a thin native wrapper for iOS."

In other words, these browser-tech-based apps show up in the app stores like any other app.

[nwienert]

The experience of said apps just doesn’t hold a candle to RN or native apps. People can tell the difference, for all but your sort of back office type apps you’ll want native views.

[hn_throwaway_99]

Completely disagree. For one, there are tons of native apps that are essentially of these "back office-type" styles. Think banking apps, most airline and hotel membership apps, real estate apps, etc. It's not hard (or I guess not harder than native) to make these apps look great using web technologies.

If you really do need the "slickness" of native apps, I wholeheartedly agree, go native, and use the native frameworks to do so.

The reason I don't like React Native much is that it occupies a "weird middle ground" - if you need the benefits of native, it's usually easier with less headaches to just go native (and big companies have announced ditching React Native due to this reason), but if you want to go cross-platform, there are other technologies that work better IMO.

[nwienert]

Sounds like you sort of agree, given you agree with my back office caveat. Sure it's some percent, maybe even a third of apps that could get by with that, but it's far from the majority.

I can point to a ton of RN apps that have incredible UX and surprisingly nice animations/interactivity, with what I'd argue is much easier to work with codebases. Maybe I'm biased, but the Uniswap app is really nicely done with all sorts of native views. They shipped the Android version of their app in just a few months, sharing 95% of the code with iOS.